Weekly Wrap Up – The One Where We Rebuilt the Solar System!

It’s hard to believe that we have already finished up four weeks of the new school year!  We’ve also finished up the first grading period for our Abeka work as well.   Time is just whizzing by anymore!

Olivia is loving the All About Spelling program!  I finally found a bigger magnetic dry erase board for her.  I wish I’d found a 24X36, but this will work for now.   Working with the spelling tiles is also helping with her dexterity in her hands, an added bonus!

Lindsey is doing great with her lessons as well.  The more work she has, the better she likes it.  I hope that’s always her mindset.  She’s keeping up nicely with Olivia in First Language Lessons, Latin, science and geography.

We finished up our study of South Carolina this week.  I’m doing much better of sticking with 2 weeks per state this year.  This week we studied the state coin and completed our collage and our state coloring page from Crayola, and our 2 page layout in our United States Coloring Book.

Our state meal from Eat Your Way Through the USA by Loree Pettit, consisted of savory baked chicken, dilled squash bread and fudge ribbon cake with chocolate frosting.  Yummmo!  I’m not a big fan of dill, but this was pretty tasty, and a good way to use up some of my end of season squashes.

Science has got to be the girls favorite subject at the moment.  They are loving the hands on activities and usually ask to do science even when it’s not our “scheduled” day for it.   This week we learned about the solar system.  After we completed our study of each planet, we built a model of the solar system for future studying.  We used a  craft kit that I found at a discount store for $3 over a year ago!

The painting took some patience.  All those little holes in the Styrofoam were tricky!

We had to let the paints dry overnight, so if you were feeling like things were a bit off kilter this week, blame us.  We had your solar system in limbo for a bit!

Olivia was feeling a bit like “Horton Hears a Who” with Pluto.

Thankfully, it didn’t take too long to get things back in order.  Saturn turned out especially lovely I think.

Olivia started piano lessons this week, and she had a blast!  She’s been practicing a lot each day and is already asking about the recital.  The biggest thrill, for me anyway, was at dinner the night of her first lesson.  She asked if she could say the blessing over the food, and then she finished up with “and thank you God for letting me take piano lessons!”

There was only one baseball game scheduled for this week and  it was rained out.  I’m secretly glad that it was cancelled, just to give Olivia a little extra mental recovery time before her first post-accident game.  On a positive note, her stitches were removed this week and she did well with that.  The scar isn’t as bad as I’d thought, and hopefully it’ll diminish with time as well.

I hope everyone else had a fabulous week!  Be sure to visit the Weekly Wrap Up.